The Best Content Curation & Ideation Tools for 2017

I am going to share with you four different content curation tools that I am currently using. I try a bunch, but we are not going to talk about the ones I do not like, I am just going to show you the ones that I am currently using and enjoying.

First up is Anders Pink, it’s an awesome name for a tool. It is very simple to use, just put in your Twitter feeds and it will pull from your network.

To get started, I have entered in some topics and you can search anything you are into like content marketing, SEOs, search engine optimization for me. You could enter in anything you want and it will start adapting to that, so it should work for any niche. You can see that top from the network, this is where my friends on Twitter are sharing these articles the most. It gives you insights into what your audience wants, but it also gives you things thatyou could share out to your followers, as well and give you ideas for future content ideation too.

One thing that really sets them apart is their briefings. In the video, you can see, I have set up a briefing and I am getting some really good content suggestions around SEO. I will show you how to do that. Just hit Create Briefing, you can add in domains and RSS, but I usually just do this from topics. We will do this SEO one together real quick, so you can see what I am doing. When you first get this, it’s pretty good except for in my feed, there are way too many Korean boy bands. You may be wondering why as am I, but actually, SEO tends to bring back a lot of this when you start to curate content.

I have found it is best to filter this out and you could go and block these sites. Some of them, if you keep seeing them over and over and over, just go down here, step five, block the domain, sure. But, if you want to get there a little bit faster, I found the step three where you can further filter down, really, really helps. We say, “Okay, it needs to say one of these at least.” I will say Google and we will do optimization. You could go much further than that if you want, but this should probably clean it up. You can see here, now my results are quite good. Now, you can do this as you want of course, but I tend to block the biggest sites in my industry. And the reason why is I am trying to avoid groupthink and unearth some unique perspective or things that I can share with my audience that they probably have not seen.

In my case, I would block moz.com, not because I do not like them, they have amazing content, it’s just that they are an industry leader. I am already going to see them in my feed and I am going to assume that most of my followers will see a lot of their content as well. If I go down here and I start blocking sites that I actually like, I can actually get a really good diversity of content and unearth some chips. Like Matthew Woodward– He has a great blog, but you are not going to see that as much in your feed as you are going to see the leaders. It is a little counter-intuitive first, but I think you will get the concept of blocking Entrepreneur.com, so you can unearth those hidden gems. Try out Anders Pink, I think you are going to love it. It is quickly becoming one of my favorite tools.

Nuzzle is very simple to use as well. You just enter in your Twitter feed and you can select. I want to see the last eight hours– what is popular with most of my friends. You can see here, Danny Sullivan stepping down from Search Engine Land– He is awesome and just been a pillar of the community. Best wishes to him going forward. But there is another feature here and this in itself is good and it is free.

There is another feature here that I really kind of like and this is your Friend’s Feeds. If they are on here, you can click more. Let’s grab Danny since we’re talking about him. Danny has a feed and I can literally go through and see what Danny has been sharing, what he’s really into, and then the response of that guy. If you are doing influence or outreach and you are trying to see what someone’s into, this is a great way to really micro down to not just your whole niche, but a specific influence or what they are into. Check out Nuzzle. It’s phenomenal. You’ll really like it.

The next one is called Refind. It is similar in the sense that it gives you a lot of discoveries and things like that from your network, but it has a few different features.

First of all, it is invite only. If you go to refind.com, it’s going to say, “Hey, do you want to join the waitlist?” If you are a member of Product Hunt, you can get in for free or if you just pretend that you are a member of Product Hunt and put in this?ref=producthunt, you’ll see that you can just join as long as you have a Twitter account. Put that in and you can get Refind right now without having to be on the waitlist. You are welcome.

Once you get in, it is pretty good. You can follow specific people from your network that you want to connect with and see what they are sharing as well. It is really, really good for narrowing down on what those influencers, the people you care about, what they are into, and it kind of surfaces that content.

The other thing they have is a Chrome extension. You don’t have to think like, “Oh, I will go to this site. I will think about it.” As you are going about your day and you hit new tab, I see this. That looks cool right there.

Lastly, now this one is only going to appeal to marketers. The others are very customized to your industry, but Zest – if you are into marketing – is very, very cool.

The reason why is that this is content curation that is manually curated. Yes, you heard that right. They have a team that literally sifts through all the click bait and all the crap, so that you get the good stuff. What you can do is they have tons of different types of marketing. Any kind of marketing that you are into. “Oh, I am into SaaS or sales or here, I have SEO.” You can see the ones I have picked: CRO, Conversion Marine Optimization, Content, SEO and Tools.

This is human-sourced content and reviewed. It is about as cool as you can get. You can also suggest links to them, which is nice. You can submit some of the stuff and they have some good filters if I just wanted video. I am looking for some video content to share or again, video content that’s working really well. This is a really, really cool– It’s free. You don’t have to do any workarounds to go log in. Really, really phenomenal that you can access that free of charge.

Conclusion

These are the tools I am using. Like I said, there are tons that I have used and they did not work or I did not like them. If you have some ideas, leave them down in the comments. If there is a tool I did not mention that you love and you are finding helpful, let me know, I am always into that or let me know which of these that you are finding the most useful.